Taking It Slowly

Taking it slowly pretty much sums up my life for the past eight months. Living with Long Covid means that every single task has to be broken down into small stages which can be tackled one at a time with rests in between. I'm trying to incorporate this approach into my designing too in the hope that I'll be able to still publish new patterns albeit less frequently than before. 

Here's an example of this ...

... one not very exciting mitten.

While knitting a pair of my walking socks as a Christmas present, I thought that the padded heel stitch would make a nice warm mitten. Now normally, I could design this sort of thing in a couple of days of solid work. This single mitten has taken me a week; I did the cuff one day, the thumb gusset the next, then the thumb ... Now all I have to do is knit the left hand mitten. I want to use two other thicknesses of yarn to see if the same pattern can be used for different sized mittens too (that chunky yarn is a possible for the bigger size).

As you can see, starting from scratch with a new pattern takes quite a while. The actual designing process is much harder than it used to be too. The ideas are still there but working out the maths is much slower now. So, I'm doing a mixture of new, very simple patterns and reviving some unfinished projects where I've already done the bulk of designing.

I do like those workbags in the picture. The red one came from a charity shop for a few pounds and the pastel one I made with some fabric my daughter gave me. Before getting ill last year, I was working on a crochet workbag in this style - that's another project I could revive.

Anyway, let's look inside those bags first. The red one holds a pile of simple knitted squares for a  blanket.

I'm using two shades of King Cole Riot DK and cream Sirdar Snuggly, both of which are very soft yarns which catch on winter hands. Luckily, I got some satsuma hand cream in my Christmas stocking which I can even smell sometimes (my sense of smell and taste is coming back, albeit in rather erratic patches). This is lovely, simple knitting as it's only garter stitch so I can work on this even when I'm feeling bad.

The other workbag holds a new lace knitting project which is the opposite of simple. First of all, I had to wind the yarn into a ball ...

It was a 100g skein of thin wool so just winding it was enough for one day. Then it took me days and days to work out the stitch pattern. I kept making mistakes with calculating how many stitches I needed to make the pattern fit and then I decided to re-arrange the stitches ... Eventually, it was done and safely written down in my notebook.

It's an eight row pattern repeat and not actually that difficult to knit but it does require counting up to five so I only manage one set of eight rows at a time. This could take a while to finish. I really like the look of this stitch pattern though; here are the two sides, both of which I think look nice.

Going back to the collection of projects - I'll give you the photo again to save you scrolling back - the pastel squares underneath are going to be another blanket.

These are knitted in the round using a rib pattern in fifteen different shades of Stylecraft Special DK. I tend to favour bright colours so it's been a nice change using the paler shades that I normally ignore. I'm halfway through this project so it's not going too badly.

Those tiny crochet squares are but a small part of what will be a mammoth project, inspired by the yarn advent calendar given to me by a friend.

It will be called 'The Power of Two' and involves more than a thousand two inch squares, half of which will be plain cream. As it's much more fun to work with variegated yarn than plain - tell me that's not just me - I'm going to make myself alternate between the two. Unfortunately, that means some catching up; I have to crochet 125 cream squares now. This is another one of my patterns influenced by maths, thanks to my mathematician son who explains it all to me.

As if one project involving lots of tiny pieces wasn't enough, I've also been working on my never-ending Folded Flowers project.

This started with another yarn advent calendar several years ago and I've been working on it more off than on ever since. The actual knitting is very simple and, over Christmas, I finally finished all the dark grey squares which were boring to knit. Now I just have to knit the rest of the coloured ones, only 39 to go.

These make lovely patterns when folded into flowers.

When they're all done, the plan is to turn them into a padded blanket for the top of the blanket box at the foot of my bed which will fold into its own cushion. Not quite sure how I'm going to make that happen but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

So ... this is how I manage to keep working, one stitch at a time and lots of rests in between. It's nice to see something completed every day, even if it is only a small knitted or crocheted square. For the same reason, I'm very much enjoying doing jigsaw puzzles too. My son and I did a 1,000 piece one over Christmas; he's much quicker than me so he was rationed as to how much he could do at one time. I'm now doing a 500 piece one on my own and the time I spend working on it each day is one of the best bits of my day.

Luckily, I have a puzzle board so it can be put away under the settee after every session. Jigsaws and cats are not a good combination. Apart from Tollys tendency to take a flying leap on to the coffee table, there's that similarity between a box full of little pieces and a litter tray ... doesn't bear thinkinbg about, does it?